There are many rumors about the opportunities on the Chinese Internet. Website owners hear that China has far more Internet users than any other country, they see reports that the Chinese economy is advancing even as other countries ‘economies are lagging, and they hear the question’ what is your strategy with China? ” he asked over and over again.
If you are interested in expanding your website to reach the “other half of the Internet,” one of the first things you probably wondered about is what kind of Chinese to use. Mandarin or Cantonese? Traditional or simplified? I will give you a simple answer first and then I will answer the most common questions I hear.
The simple answer: if you want to attract the maximum number of Chinese consumers, use Mandarin Chinese written in simplified Chinese characters.
“What about Cantonese?” I am often asked. Cantonese is just one of the many Chinese dialects that are spoken. It is spoken mainly by people from the province of Canton and Hong Kong. There has been a huge wave of Cantonese-speaking emigrants in the last fifty years, so much so that many Western cities have a large population of Cantonese speakers, causing some Westerners to think that Cantonese is much more important than it is. In fact, Mandarin is the official language of China and most Cantonese speakers can understand Mandarin as well.
“How many Chinese letters are there?” is another question that I hear a lot. The answer is that there are no Chinese “letters”; Chinese uses “characters” and there are many thousands of Chinese characters that are used in modern Chinese. Most modern Chinese words consist of two characters, but there are also words with a single character or with three or more characters.
“Isn’t there more than one type of Chinese writing?” Yes there are. There are two forms of Chinese characters: “traditional” and “simplified”. Today, the simplified form is used in mainland China, and that makes it the world standard. However, traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and many Chinese immigrant communities. Readers of one way can often understand the other way.
Finally, a common question is “In what direction is it written in Chinese?” Chinese is generally written from left to right. The only reason a website would be written from right to left or top to bottom would be to give a fancy image, usually for traditional products. So you don’t need to create a duplicate version of your website design.
So there you have it, as a general rule of thumb, when you have your website translated into Chinese, you should use Mandarin Chinese written in simplified characters. Only if you are targeting a specific Chinese location (or emigrants from that location) should you consider using traditional characters and another Chinese dialect such as Cantonese.